Dexter, Hannibal, Bates Motel: Why do we love TV serial killers?

There's something about them... Something emotionally intriguing and intellectually engaging that draws us in, makes us part of their sick puzzle.

Serial killers are muscling into more and more prime-time hours, on cable and broadcast TV, in series that win awards and ratings and push the boundaries of the medium. Imagine, “Criminal Minds” on CBS just wooed nearly 13 million viewers to its medley of mayhem, mystery and gore. (This is the series Mandy Patinkin left, calling it his biggest public mistake, because of the level of violence.) “Hannibal” on NBC won a second season, boosted by critical acclaim. Showtime's “Dexter” won endless Emmy nominations, and HBO's “True Detective” is the most artful newcomer of the season.

Why do we find serial killers so sexy?

Judging by too many small-screen depictions of late, serial killers have never been more beguiling. They're smart, debonair, diabolical and demented. They cleverly communicate in code. They taunt the world with a secret. They build a twisted relationship with those in pursuit — and with the audience — in which mind games play a prominent part.

Viewers are apparently transfixed by them — witness the surge in serial-killer storylines in the darkest TV dramas of late, several of them adaptations of European hits.

“True Detective,” which premiered in January on HBO, has Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson tracking weird cult-like clues in serial murders in rural Louisiana.

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“Those Who Kill,” due March 3 on A&E and adapted from a Danish series, features Chloe Sevigny on the hunt for a suspected killer in her own family circle. They play cat-and-mouse, while she nabs other serial murderers with help from a forensic psychiatrist (James D'Arcy). Sevigny's character serves as the viewer's surrogate to emotionally connect with killers' madness.

The late “Dexter” on Showtime won both dramatic honors and criticism for the violence depicted, raising cable TV's level of gore to previously unimagined heights. Dexter was a “righteous” killer, he insisted, exacting retribution while bypassing the uncertain criminal justice system. In Dexter's wake, a number of series, including some on broadcast TV, are upping the serial-killer violence quotient.

“Hannibal” on NBC, a nod to the great “Silence of the Lambs,” tucks into season 2 on Feb. 28. The cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter understands the human mind and emotions, is a gourmet chef (with or without human organ ingredients), knows good wine and is impeccably dressed as he assists those trying to crack a homicide case. Such a well-mannered psycho.

Kevin Bacon in the cheesier “The Following” on Fox is back, chasing a serial killer played by James Purefoy; “Bates Motel” on A&E, returning March 3, carries on demented tradition, a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock's “Psycho.” In “The Bridge,” a Danish-Swedish adaptation renewed for a second season on FX, two detectives work both sides of the El Paso/Juarez border in search of a serial killer.

What is the fascination with these game-playing killers?

Killers glamorized

Denver forensic psychiatrist Richard Martinez notes the serial-killer phenomena “is rare, and never glamorous as portrayed in these shows. Reviewing autopsy and crime scene photos is painful and difficult. There is little detachment from the fact that real human beings lost their lives and suffered. I'm not sure the television version captures the pain and suffering, the aftermath of these stories.”

“Madness in the sense of individuals losing rational control — suffering with delusions and hallucinations — is interesting to us, but doesn't make interesting TV stories,” Martinez said. “Psychopathy on the other hand — the character in “The Following” whom Bacon is pursuing, or Dexter — where individuals appear rational, yet engage in such horrific behavior, even using their intelligence to accomplish their deranged ends, is more fascinating and frightening to us. The absence of a moral compass, absence of human empathy and compassion, intrigues, because the possibility of moral failure is in all human beings, but in these shows taken to such horrific extremes.”

The usual motivations of lust, greed or revenge are absent in psychopathic characters. Unlike tragic Shakespearean characters, they show no remorse. “Pure drive for power and control, narcissism at its extreme, the total objectifying of fellow human beings, these are some of the dynamics at the center of many of these characters,” Martinez said. They serve as “a reminder of how vulnerable we are, how little we can predict and control such deviance, yet if we keep watching, maybe we will understand.”

Psychopaths are often described as charming and charismatic, so TV's versions of killers as meticulous, well-groomed, cultivated intellectuals play to the stereotype. Psycho killers are not always as handsome and debonair as “Hannibal” in real life.

Therese Jones, interim director of the CU Center for Bioethics and Humanities in Boulder, brings a background in literature to the question. A common thread “in trying to understand why we find them so sexy is that they represent a kind of masculine terrorism — we can be both repelled and titillated despite our gender,” she said. “Serial killers link murder, masculinity and misogyny (fear and hatred of women) in very dramatic ways. There is the obvious connection between killing and sexual pleasure. This is most evident in imagery associated with Jack the Ripper, and there are those serial killers, real and fictional, who have emulated the Ripper, like Ted Bundy.”

Jones notes these stories play on our attraction/repulsion toward “the ultimate evil outsider who lives among us. He reflects our fears about someone who wantonly disregards all social, legal and moral injunctions but also reflects our desires to do the same. Certainly, the best literary example of that would be Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.' ”

Evil, pure and simple

The idea that the serial killer's behavior is “incomprehensible” excuses us from trying to prevent or control it, she notes. “Psychopaths or evil outsiders can neither be controlled nor understood. They are just evil, and that's it. In folklore, they would be linked to the boogeyman.”

That's another way of saying the viewer is off the hook, free to thrill to the creepy criminal behavior onscreen.

In his 2005 book, “Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture,” David Schmid writes mostly about films like “Silence of the Lambs.” But his thoughts translate to current television depictions. These entertainments “are nearly always premised on a person's ability to identify with the serial killer in the sense of learning to think like him, coming to see the world through his eyes. This type of identification is often presented in these films as dangerous, because it can lead to the violent cancellation of one's own identity; but only in this way, these films suggest, can the serial killer be apprehended.”

Schmid suggests we like the excitement of getting inside the killer's mind, partly because we are given an out, “a way to disavow identification with the serial killer,” which keeps us tuned in.

“Indeed, this disavowal is the secret to the success of these films and perhaps to the success of celebrity serial-killer popular culture in general.” By making the killer the evil Other, or “through appeals to aestheticism,” he writes, the viewer is let off the hook.

My, that Dr. Lecter has a nice home!

We're free of guilt, while on the hook for weekly TV visits with serial murder. Never have we witnessed so many TV images of bodies decomposed, dissected, sexually abused, splayed, posed in sculptured forms, crowned with antlers... The gruesome details have never been so explicitly enacted, with cable leading the way and broadcast networks mimicking the horror.

For the creators, it's about snaring the viewer by going deep into unconscious territory.